


Write This On My Soul

by Areiton



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Pining Sam Winchester, Sam-Centric, Tattoo Artist Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 17:26:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9913172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Areiton/pseuds/Areiton
Summary: “Do you ever do it for fun anymore?” he asks, one night when he's had too much to drink and the last client has gone.Dean pulls his gloves off with a snap and tosses them with the tiny cups of ink. Cleans his machine and disposes of the needle and packs it all away and nods at the cash. “We’re good to move on. Think there's a black dog in Wyoming.”Sam stares at him for a long moment, until Dean ducks into the shower and ends the conversation for good.





	

It wasn’t surprising that Sam was the one who noticed. Sam had always been the first to notice things about Dean, especially if the new skill didn’t involve killing something. He was always the one who watched Dean and tried to make him smile.    
So when he sees it—a scribbled Celtic knot in painfully intricate detail—that first time.    
He notices.

He's the one who sees and he tucks it away. Keeps the scrap of drawing that Dean threw away and watches. 

 

*

 

He's the one who brings it up when they're back against a wall and desperate. “Dean! Draw that sigil from yesterday!” he shouts. They saw it in a lore book Sam lifted from Bobby, an old ghost binding sigil that was intricate and exact and probably didn't work. John gave them an incredulous look, but Dean had already snatched up a sooty stick and was going to work, quick and efficient, knife in one hand, Sam braced in front of him. The ghost was screeching at John, phantom fingers digging into John’s chest, and then Dean closed the sigil and it lit up like a fucking Christmas tree, screech cut off abruptly as the light ate it up.

Sam grins, all smug knowing delight, while John stares at them in baffled surprise. Dean just looks shellshocked.

And maybe a little proud. 

 

*

 

They move a lot. A car full of weapons and clothes, and beer. It doesn't leave much for pastimes--Sam devours books, demands they stop at garage sales where he’ll pick through old boxes of them and come back to the car with a stack he bought for two dollars. he'll read and then abandon them in a coffee shop or a diner before starting all over again. 

Dean scribbles. Sometimes it's the people they see, sometimes it's monsters  (with notes on how to kill them and when they hunted it, what he learned about them). Sometimes it's a landscape, something he can't forget. There are a lot of sigils and wards. He fills up three books like this, tucking them away in his duffle. 

John doesn't get it, but he doesn't mind, not as long as Dean drops his pencil and picks up a gun whenever they stop driving. 

 

*

 

It becomes a thing. Sam will find sigils and Dean will draw them. Until he can do it in his sleep. John tolerates it because they use those sigils on hunts. Some of them makes him nervous because they feel like witchcraft--the one that Dean wrote careful and precise on the inside curve of Sam’s arm that masked his smell when they were hunting a werewolf--but Sam stares at him with cold determination and Dean with belligerent innocence and he kept quiet. It was useful. 

 

*

 

Dean never draws people. 

No. Dean never finishes drawing people. Sam sees the half done sketches of their waitresses and the civvies they interview, when he curls against Dean, half asleep, half reading and always attentive to his brother. 

But he never finishes them and he never draws Sam. 

It bothers him, a little. 

 

* 

 

The first time Dean tattoos, it's himself, and it doesn't mean anything--It's a cage with a locked door, delicate and sad on his calf. Sam stares at it for hours, almost entranced by this new addition to his familiar brother. He tries to touch it, and Dean slaps his hand away, growling. The tattoo machine and inks were from Bobby, tired of seeing sigils smudged and fading in Sharpie on the boys skin. Dean practices on fruit for months and a couple corpses before they dispose of them--John wasn’t with them when Bobby okaed  _ that _ little experiment--long before he ever took the needle to himself. 

He’s good at it, something that startles him and makes Sam roll his eyes. 

Because of course he’s good at it. 

 

* 

 

When Sam leaves to go to Stanford, Dean tattoos him for the first time. They’re laying in bed, and John is a few feet away, drunk in the aftermath of a hunt, and Sam has just told Dean he’s leaving. 

Dean stares for a long time and then, he blurts it out. “I wanna tattoo you.” 

Something in his gut twists because Dean has been kinda bitchy and ridiculous about not touching his brother with that stupid machine. 

He nods, wordless and stretches out on the bed, shirtless, and Dean straddles him, a familiar weight across his hips, and Sam sinks into the bed as Dean marks him. 

Neither mentions the soft press of lips to the sensitive skin before Dean cleans it up and wraps it. He rolls away and Sam lays there, blinking back tears.

His shoulder is sore for weeks, as he rides that bus to California and settles into a life that is normal and somehow dimmer, all of the beauty drawn out of it. 

He misses the subtle pain when the tattoo heals.

 

*

 

After Sam leaves, Dean quits. 

He tucks his sketchbooks away, wraps up his tattoo machine, tosses his ink. Throws himself into hunting and forgets what it was like to have fingers stained with pencil and charcoal and not blood. 

Sometimes, when he’s killing the big bad uglies, he considers that he’s still making art--it’s just the medium that’s changed. His canvas now is the world and the monster’s body, his medium blood and the stroke of his knife. 

It makes him smile, a rictus grin that scares John. 

Well, it scares him too. 

 

*

 

After a year, he picks up a pencil. Sam is gone and happy. Being miserable isn’t doing anything to his brother, so why fucking bother? 

 

*

 

He’s in a bar outside of Tulsa when it happens the first time. He’d helped John clear out a pack of werewolves, and after John drives off with a bottle of whiskey and a few vague promises, Dean parks himself at a bar and gets friendly with his old friend Jack.

The guy admiring his tattoos isn't the first guy whose ever done so, and he isn't the first guy Dean's ever dragged back to his hotel for a night of fucking that feels like fighting. 

But he's the first guy who traces them, the swirls of color that makes a crimea, the sigils that paint his forearms and ribs. The cascade of feathers down his shoulders and back--that's the only piece he didn't do himself. The guy kisses them and talks about how he wants some work done, and Dean finds himself offering.

After that, it's easier. 

 

*

 

He finds he can make more doing tattoos for a few hours than he can hustling pool and while he never stops--because hustling pool is  _ fun _ \--he gets in the habit of doing work out of his hotel room, when he's between hunts. 

It's soothing. And if it makes him think of Sam, of the way his brother was so pleased whenever he took up a pencil--well. 

He has liquor for that. 

 

*

 

_ “Dad’s on a hunting trip. Hasn't been home in a few days.” _

 

*

 

Being back together. It's different. Sam is angrier, and softer. He feels like a stranger and he feels familiar and Dean keeps watching him, like he can't quite believe he's real and  _ here.  _

Sam watches him too. 

Watches while he drinks and seduces pretty easy things. Watches while he pulls on gloves and inks his clients. Watches him sketch sigils and wards on his skin before a hunt, and- 

“Do you ever do it for fun anymore?” he asks, one night when he's had too much to drink and the last client has gone. Dean pulls his gloves off with a snap and tosses them with the tiny cups of ink. Cleans his machine and disposes of the needle and packs it all away and nods at the cash. “We’re good to move on. Think there's a black dog in Wyoming.” 

Sam stares at him for a long moment, until Dean ducks into the shower and ends the conversation for good.

“So I guess that's a no,” he says, to no one. 

 

*

 

They find Dad and they lose him and Sam would care more if he weren't so fucking happy he didn't lose Dean too. 

Dean's been the center of his universe since Sam knew how to speak, and the idea of losing that made his hands shake with fear.

But it's killing Dean, this sharp edged knife digging in and Sam doesn't know how to help. Doesn't know what to do other than stand there, waiting for his brother, the way Dean always waited for him. 

They hunt and Sam is there, and Dean draws his demons on other people and on paper that he burns, until he smells, always, of bits of ash and blood and Sam thinks maybe that's pretty damn accurate.

 

*

 

But it gets easier. 

Well. 

It gets easier and it gets harder and that's just the way their life goes, the way it always goes for them. 

Dean tattoos strangers and Sam reads lore and points at sigils they can use and they hunt and drink together, fall back into life together. Dean stops running so hard, adds a bullet to the rose that he did for Mom when Sam was away, and gets blind drunk after. 

They hunt and they do that strange thing they call living that doesn't actually come close to it, but it'll do. They find their way, back to each other, find that special sweet place that is indefinable and theirs and home. The one where they can plan with a look, and communicate with a touch, and it’s not healthy but it’s  _ theirs _ and it’s  _ home. _

 

_ * _

 

Then Sam gets possessed.

 

*

 

It's messy and awful. Sam leaves a trail of dead bodies and Dean comes away with another bullet hole and busted up knuckles from where he punched Sam in the jaw. 

Sam comes away with more nightmares and regret, and a burning need to clean his hands, screaming them both awake for two straight weeks before he goes silent and if he dreams of that awful stretch of days, of killing and Jo shaking under his hand and his blood burning in his skin--he doesn't ever tell Dean.

But it wakes em up, shakes them out of their untouchable apathy. Bobby and Sam spend two days researching and on the third, Dean bends over his brother for the second time, hands steady and eyes bruised and inks flames and protection into his skin. 

 

*

 

It's easier, after that. 

Easier to mark Sam with protective sigils and runes, hidden under his shirt, walking up and down his spine, arcane marks. Every one feels like a link in a chain that binds them closer, and every time he takes the machine to Sam, every time Sam brings him a new sigil to scribble down and use, every time they kill something and fall into hotel beds a few feet apart, it drives home the unshakable truth. 

Sam is never gonna leave him again. 

 

*

 

When Sam dies, Dean doesn't think. He acts because if he thinks, he'll put his gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. He knows Bobby expects it, knows he’ll fight him on it, but he could do it. 

A very tired, broken part of him wants to. 

Sam was his and he let him go, gave him up so the kid could have normal and happy and safe, and then dragged him back. Chained him to the life, to Dean, and he doesn't know how to reconcile that with the body lying on the bed. 

It looks, almost, like he's sleeping. Except he's seen Sam sleep, pressed childish soft next to him when they were young, and rough but boyish in the bed a heartbeat away, spent his life with Sam sleeping the last thing he sees when he closes his eyes and the first thing to greet him in the morning. 

Anyone else could see him and see a man asleep. 

Dean could never believe that lie, even when he's desperate to. 

He can't live without Sam. He won't. Simple decision, and easy enough to fix, when you're a Winchester. Easy enough to make a deal. 

Price is high but it's Sam. 

There's nothing he won't do for Sam. 

 

*

 

It works and he gets Sam back and it's like for the first time, he's free. He knows how and when it ends and he's ok with that, ok with the ticking time clock. He tattoos a Latin chant on his ribs--hurts like a bitch--and he opens up his sketch books for the first time in years. 

 

*

 

It's hell to watch. To see Dean without any self preservation, throwing himself into danger. 

And then Gabriel makes him live it, watch Dean die over and over and he expects it to get easier, to be numb to it. 

But he never is. It never gets easier. Having half of your heart ripped out never gets easier.  

 

* 

 

Sam tries to get Dean to try tattoo voodoo wards, black magic sigils, any fucking thing that might hide him from the Hell Hounds. 

Dean just laughs and drags out his machine and inks and covers the still bare skin on his abdomen with a staircase that goes nowhere. 

He thinks it's appropriate. Sam punches him in the face. 

 

* 

 

The day Sam realizes Dean is scared, that he's hiding just how terrified he is, is the day he sees what Dean's been sketching. 

 

*

 

When Dean wakes up, it's dark and he doesn't believe it. Alistair fucked with him enough that the taste of dirt, the hint of  _ air _ makes him flinch. 

He hates illusions. 

But then his lungs burn and he reaches for the surface. 

When he breaks through, it isn't hell he sees. 

It's earth. A ruined forest and his skin, so clear and blank he doesn't recognize himself. 

 

*

 

Bobby doesn't buy his Lazarus impression, but something in Dean settles when the man who should have been his father recognizes him, even without his ink. 

He didn't, when he saw himself in the mirror. 

But he can see beneath the suspicion, beneath the fear, the  _ want _ . 

He wants Dean to be real. 

 

* 

 

Sam. Sam is harder and easier, heartbreaking and what he's been waiting for, the welcome home and a jangling wrong note. 

Dean pulls him close and blinks away the tears and the way something in him screams that this is  _ wrong.  _

 

* 

 

_ “I'm the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition.”  _

 

*

 

Dean doesn't know what to do with something like Castiel. With his wild hair and alien eyes and that crackling energy that presses against Dean whenever they're in the same room. It licks over his skin and he wants to hide from it, and he wants to bury himself in the angel’s arms because that energy is the only thing that has felt right since he came back. 

The angel doesn't say much, just watched Dean and makes cryptic references to a job he needs to do. 

Then the Seals start breaking and he doesn't have time to dwell on wild hair and alien eyes and why Castiel feels like  _ home. _

 

* 

 

Sam doesn't know what to make of Dean. Risen from Hell and wearing a skin that he doesn’t know, a skin free of ink and scars and the marks that Sam knows better than his own. 

He is clean and pure and untouched, with an angel at his side and a mission that Sam doesn’t quite believe in, and Sam is sullied and scarred, marked with magic arcane and powerful and he doesn’t know how to be with Dean, how to hunt with Dean, when he is so different and they are so very far apart. 

 

*

 

The Seals break and Dean grows darker, shadows under his eyes, and his hands shake, sometimes, when he’s reaching for the whiskey and doesn’t realize that Sam is watching him. 

Sam is always watching him. 

He doesn’t know how Dean hasn’t realized that yet. 

 

*

 

He’s patient. Castiel demands and demands and demands, and he doesn’t  _ hurt _ Dean, but there is an imbalance in their relationship, a fascination in Dean that is not reflected in Castiel. The angels are imperious and take what they want, push even when he’s on the edge of breaking. 

Dean always breaks, and he is the one who picks up the pieces. Even when Castiel becomes a friend--a strange and alien otherworldly being, but somehow still a friend--Sam is the place where Dean breaks. 

 

*

 

Dean doesn’t pick up his tattoo gun until after Alastair. And then it is only because Sam insists, demands that he wears an anti possession charm. 

It breaks something in him, some dam that kept him from the ink and sketching while Sam slept, kept him too focused on the end of all things to remember that there are some things he loves. 

Still. There are some things he loves. 

 

*

 

Seeing ink on his brother’s skin, finally, settles something in Sam. The Dean that returned from Hell with no scars and no stories on his skin, with only an angel’s brand--that wasn’t  _ his _ Dean. 

His Dean sketched at night, his fingers stained with pen and graphite and charcoal, and the hum of the tattoo machine filling their hotel room. 

His Dean hid everything he was in beautiful art on his skin, arcane symbols of protection, bloody chains and galaxies of stars. A ruined forest and a sun bleeding color down his ribs. 

And a rose shot through with a bullet. 

Wings, feathering down his back. 

With every line of ink and scratch of color, he sees Dean in the stranger who came back from hell. 

 

*

 

He knows, that Dean loves the angel. 

He’s known since the first time he heard Dean say  _ Cas _ , his lips twisting in that soft smile so like the one he used to give to Sam. When they were innocent and Sam watched his brother and believed that nothing would ever touch them. 

Then Castiel falls for them--for Dean--and Dean is the one he turns to, falling apart, and Sam watches his brother put the angel back together. 

 

*

 

He knows, the day he sees what Dean is sketching, that Castiel is never leaving. 

 

*

 

The first time Dean tattoos Cas, Sam gets drunk and picks up a girl with dirty blonde hair and muddy green eyes. He pushes her into bed and settles between her legs, buries himself in her wet heat and doesn’t think of how smooth and untouched her skin is. 

After, he feels a little sick and a lot guilty, and bitter 

 

*

 

They hunt, and Dean is happy and his angel fights at their side, and when they are between hunts, Dean paints, occasionally. 

He doesn’t always create with blood and bone, now. 

And maybe Sam can accept Cas, if that’s true. 

 

*

 

Sometimes, Dean smiles, and there is nothing behind it, no shadows, no apocalypse, no hell. And it feels like the space that they inhabit. The one that is theirs and is home. 

 

*

 

Sam learns.

Sam learns to love the angel, against all odds. 

Learns to love silent and from a distance and that he is still--always--the place where Dean breaks. 

Learns Castiel claimed Dean’s soul, but he is Dean’s heart, has been since before he knew what that meant.  

It’s painful, but that’s ok. They live with pain, like a relative they don’t quite like but can’t ever shake. It’s in their friendships and their work, and the stories that Dean presses into their skin.

 

*

 

Sam finds it, four years after Cas fell for the last time, when Dean is old and tired, and has died and come back, and rewritten his story on his skin more times than Sam likes to think about.

When the same can be also said of Sam. 

It’s similar to the one he found, before he left for Stanford, and the one he found during the first apocalypse, when he realized Dean loved Castiel.  

A carefully sketched portrait, of him, and Cas, intricate and so fucking lifelike it makes his breath catch, a little.  

He finds it and he smiles, slipping out of the bedroom that Dean shares with Cas, and walks down the hall to his room. 

 

*

 

Dean doesn’t draw people. Well. He doesn’t finish them--because he loses them, so easily and often. Except for the ones that he can’t resist, the ones he can’t help but love, the ones he refuses to lose. 

 

* 

 

They both carry a lifetime on their skin, stories written there with ink and Dean’s patient skill, and it ties them together, every arcane symbol a link tying them together. 


End file.
